That’s certainly true with Cal Poly 24-hour Hackathon participants Jack Maize, Ali Albiani and Kevin DeBoer, who won an award for best library app. Jack, Ali and Kevin are the minds behind the app concept Fish Bowl, which allows users to reserve Kennedy Library’s fish bowls, the collaborative study rooms on the second floor.

“We basically started off thinking of things that could be better for school,” Jack said.

The three graphic design students met the night before the Hackathon to discuss app ideas. Ali’s sorority meets frequently in the fish bowls, and thought the current system, requesting space by e-mail, could be improved. She proposed creating an app to automate fish bowl reservation, and together that’s what they decided to do.

As part of their process, the team spoke with PolyConnect employees to understand how fish bowl scheduling works, and then designed Fish Bowl so that no one is required to answer e-mail requests and enter the schedule by hand.

“It’s one less thing they (staff) would have to do,” Ali said. The app would allow students to see which rooms are open by date and time, as well as book a room and upload study notes to the meeting info.

From left to right, Jack, Ali and Kevin worked as a team for 24 hours to create the Fish Bowl app concept.

Though the app is not finished, the team received positive feedback from Evernote, the company that sponsored the Hackathon. Now, the three are planning to find a computer engineer to make Fish Bowl a reality.

It would not only fill a need at Cal Poly, but could be used at other universities as well as businesses, Kevin said.